Wikipedia Sucks!

....one of his own Tesla roadsters into orbit, and streams the video of the car on YouTube:




The car is going to be further boosted into an elliptical orbit around Mars, no word if the Tesla and it's spacesuit-ed dummy crewmember will be sucked into the gravity well of Mars at the end of the trip or if the vehicle is doomed to a long, loopy eternal orbit around the red planet. If the latter, this is a good theme for it:

....And then it gets goofy:

Elon Musk‏ Verified account @elonmusk [from Twitter]

Third burn successful. Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt.

***

It's not just space junk, it's Deep Solar-System Space Junk, because the chances of the car (which has no beacon) getting attracted to Jupiter are there, and God-knows-where Starman the dummy and his stereo blasting the Bowie song of the same name will end up.....

A feat deserving mockery, because instead of sending a scientific payload or something else useful, Musk pulled rank and sent a goddamn car. His company spent $500 million to accomplish a publicity stunt.

ericbarbour wrote:A feat deserving mockery, because instead of sending a scientific payload or something else useful, Musk pulled rank and sent a goddamn car. His company spent $500 million to accomplish a publicity stunt.

elongoesforadrive.jpg

The reason why he pulled this propaganda trick comes from how Tesla is not producing enough cars - Musk set the goal of 400,000 units for this fiscal year but they still aren't reaching that. So shooting a car at Mars is a distraction of sorts, and supposedly the car won't even hit the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, just whiz past the far side of Mars' orbit, then fall back towards the Sun.

Meanwhile, shit like this happens in the background:

http://autoweek.com/article/technology/ ... le-lithium

https://seekingalpha.com/article/414566 ... -reporting

ericbarbour wrote:A feat deserving mockery, because instead of sending a scientific payload or something else useful, Musk pulled rank and sent a goddamn car. His company spent $500 million to accomplish a publicity stunt.

elongoesforadrive.jpg

From what I have read, it was either launch a cement slab as a dummy payload, or send the roadster off on an eternal orbit chasing Mars.

There is the question of interplanetary radiation and what it will do to the carbon-fiber body of the car; one scientist was quoted saying that he gives the vehicle a year thanks to the sun possibly frying it all over as it spins and the carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds in all the plastics getting slashed by occasional beams of gamma radiation, while the random micrometeoroid rips into the car like a hypersonic BB slug. Anything larger and the roadster body might be ripped in half, lose a door or two, or otherwise be mangled badly. Barring major collisions, possibly in two years all that will be left will be the car's aluminum chassis, the windshield, and anything else made out of metal on the roadster that was attached to the chassis. We don't know because we've never launched a carbon-fiber and aluminum car into the solar system before.